Colonising Egypt

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In the 19th century, the study of the ancient languages in West Asia was called Orientalism. In this time, the scientific study of any subject was under the umbrella of development and evolution. As geologists discovered the evolution of the earth and biologists the development of the human body, Orientalists discovered the evolution of the human mind through languages. Until the Muslim conquest, great continuity had typified Egyptian rural life. Despite the incongruent ethnicity of successive ruling groups and the cosmopolitan nature of Egypt’s larger urban centres, the language and culture of the rural, agrarian masses—whose lives were largely measured by the annual rise and fall of the Nile River, with its annual inundation—had changed only marginally throughout the centuries. Following the conquests, both urban and rural culture began to adopt elements of Arab culture, and an Arabic vernacular eventually replaced the Egyptian language as the common means of spoken discourse. Moreover, since that time, Egypt’s history has been part of the broader Islamic world, and though Egyptians continued to be ruled by foreign elite—whether Arab, Kurdish, Circassian, or Turkish—the country’s cultural milieu remained predominantly Arab. Egypt held particular interest for Victorians as a strategic gateway to the Orient. The first Arabic-speaking country to experience overlapping colonial encroachments by European powers, Egypt became an autonomous state within the Ottoman Empire under the rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha (1805-1848) and his male successors. From 1852, Britain kept an increased presence in northern Egypt to maintain the overland trade route to India and to oversee the construction of the Cairo–Alexandria railway, the first British railway built on foreign soil. Shortly thereafter, French investors financed the construction of the Suez Canal to connect the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Isma’il Pasha sold Egypt’s shares of the Suez Canal Company to Britain in 1875 in the wake of a financial crisis. Dissatisfaction with European and Ottoman rule led to a nationalist revolt in 1879. The British military occupied Egypt in 1882 to protect financial interests in the country, culminating in a violent war. Britain won, restored the Khedival authority in Cairo, and established a ‘veiled protectorate’ over Ottoman-Egypt until the First World War. The British occupation saw an increase in archaeological fieldwork, tourism, and irrigation projects to boost Egypt’s cotton production and exportation. Egypt declared independence in 1922, although Britain did not withdraw all its troops until after the 1956 Suez Crisis. The extent of the processes of representation begins to reveal the elusiveness of their apparently simple structural effect. The structure of meaning in a system of representation arises, it is suggested, from the distinction maintained between the realm of representation and the external reality to which it refers. Yet this real world, outside the exhibition, seems actually to have consisted only of further representations of the real. Just as the imitations in the exhibition were marked with traces of the real (were the natives on display not real people?), so the reality outside was never quite unmediated. Colonising Egypt is not concerned so much with this necessary elusiveness, but with the question of how it comes to be overlooked. How does the colonising process extend the world-as-exhibition, supplanting with its powerful metaphysic other less effective theologies?

The ʻUrabi Revolt, a large military demonstration in September 1881, forced the Khedive Tewfiq to dismiss his Prime Minister and rule by decree. Many of the Europeans retreated to specially designed quarters suited for defense or heavily European-settled cities such as Alexandria. Alexandria in ruins after the British bombardment of 1882.

The question of meaning or representation is an essential aspect of this structural effect, and is the central theme of the book. The methods of organisation and arrangement that produce the new effects of structure, it is argued, also generate the modern experience of meaning as a process of representation. In the metaphysics of capitalist modernity, the world is experienced in terms of an ontological distinction between physical reality and its representation—in language, culture, or other forms of meaning. Reality is material, inert, and without inherent meaning, and representation is the non-material, non-physical dimension of intelligibility. Colonising Egypt explores the power and limits of this ontology by showing the forms of colonising practice that generate it. As a motif exemplifying the nature of representation, the book takes the great nineteenth-century world exhibitions that formed part of Europe's colonising project. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, it refers to this modernist metaphysics as the world-as-exhibition.

Similarly, neocolonialism—a loose concept that only emerged following the end of the final wave of European colonialism in the early to mid-1900s—generally refers to the continuation of colonial economic, social, and political policies, especially as exercised by colonizing nations toward the populations and lands that they formerly colonized. These policies maintain a system of dependence and exploit populations for their labor and the land for its natural resources, while also often depending on a class of elites from the disadvantaged country who are willing to boost and maintain such policies for their own power or economic advantage. Colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism are thus three distinct processes possessing significant overlap, all of which have been observed in the Arab world, and which in some cases are ongoing. Colonialism in the Arab World Mitchell's effort at a theoretical construct is brilliant and his details are fascinating (especially the specific examples brought to light from the remoteness of a century ago, such as his descriptions of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris and the Lancaster method of teaching). But his effort is deeply wrong-headed, even perverse. Take the matter of Egyptians refusing to adopt the printing press until the nineteenth century. Mitchell dismisses the usual explanation, obscurantism and preservation of power. Instead, he recalls the high Muslim practice of text recitation and explication, then argues that this tradition made the prospect of uncontrolled publishing anathema to the scholars. Mitchell's is a brave attempt, but he fails on two counts. First, he has done no more than specify the reasons for obscurantism; second, not every piece of writing is a "text" requiring explanation and not all opposition came from scholars; the opposition to printing had far deeper and wider roots than Mitchell allows.The instructions were disseminated ultimately from European capitals. In “After We Have Captured Their Bodies,” Mitchell examines the complicit connections between Europe’s colonial history and the disciplinary history of the Western academy. Once the social body of the colony had been surveilled, disciplined and regimented, political power and an adequate notion of politics needed to be introduced and consolidated within Egypt itself. That notion was developed as “political science” in Europe. Mitchell in turn reads in 19th-century Egyptian thinkers such as Tahtawi, Mustafa Kamil and Muhammad al-Muwailihi the conflicted history of Egyptian politics over the latter half of the 19th century. THE FRENCH OCCUPATION of Egypt between 1798-1801 was the first colonial conquest which endeavored to bring the Enlightenment to the Orient. When the French occupiers set out to colonize Egypt, they considered themselves both liberators and saviors of the native Egyptians.